1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to annotation of skin images and, more specifically, to systems and methods for the annotation of skin images using learned feature representation.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Dermatoscopy is a process by which skin lesions are examined, generally under magnification. Dermatoscopy may be performed with a traditional magnifying apparatus or a digital apparatus. Digital dermatoscopy images may be analyzed by a machine to aid medical practitioners in the identification and characterization of various skin lesions.
Where digital analysis is performed, a computer attempts to match the characteristics of the lesion with sets of features that are indicative of various diagnoses. These features are hand-crafted, which is to say, they are manually programmed with the aid of a human expert, to identify characteristics known by the human expert to be indicative of a particular diagnosis.
After the hand-crafted features are constructed, various medical imaging techniques such as gradient vector flow (GVF), level set methods, adaptive thresholding, adaptive snake, EM level set, and fuzzy-based split and merging techniques may be used to characterize the lesion.